


Blackhat Intimacy

by harrietscats



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: Actual dad!Mallory, Bisexual Q, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Female Q, Hurt/Comfort, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Female Character, Post-Skyfall, Q Has a Cat, Q is a Holmes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:23:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrietscats/pseuds/harrietscats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is nothing more mysterious than MI6's Quartermaster. The title has always come with a mystique only attached to the office of M. With the name, the title, came a power that made international leaders cringe, and the upper echelons of the greater intelligence community immediately leap to attention. But what was Q before the letter? What was Q before the mystique? After the events on the Skyfall Estate, after the great loss of M, after Nine Eyes and SPECTRE and the debacle of Blofeld, MI6 is left in flux. Her new Quartermaster, the one thing that hinges the return of the double-O program, is left to not only mend broken pieces, but maintain the legendary efficiency that Q branch is known for. Six's new Quartermaster is known by no other name, no other title, and, to her branch, has no life outside of her work. And that is exactly how she would like to keep things.</p>
<p>Eventually, she must learn that 'Q' and the woman she was before are not as interchangeable as she would like to believe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pas De Sixs

**Author's Note:**

> So, instead of editing my manuscript like I should be, I decided to churn out another novel-length fanfiction. I like developing backstory, and developing characters. Changing Q from cis-boy to cis-girl allows a certain change of narrative. This does not take away from the queer aspect of the character that the fandom developed, and if it does, I apologize. I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.

Later, Q will feign ignorance over the events that transpired between that ski lift in Austria, and awakening in Six’s personal hospital. She was a skillful liar—she might be “technical support”, but she was still embroiled in the ultimate Game—and, in the end, it was almost pitifully easy to trick the kind doctor into believing her to be mentally sound. The questions were repetitive, the banter pedantic, and the woman too concerned with Q’s imagined hurts. The answers, after a while, became second nature. “No, Doctor, I can’t seem to recall that.” “I shot someone? Dear me, that sounds trying.” “If I recall, a very large man broke my arm while I was trying to destroy my laptop.”  


In the end, the doctor had no choice but to declare her mentally fit for duty. She said so with great scrutiny and a dubious gleam in her eyes from her uncomfortable plastic chair beside Q’s bed. Q, arm held close to her chest in it’s brace, lips cut, face bruised and held together with glue, thread, and neat butterfly bandages, merely nodded politely, as if the outcome had been expected. 

“I’d like my glasses, if you please,” she said. “And my laptop.”

Those requests were, unfortunately, denied.

Five days. That was the penance for her sins. Q underwent it with much complaining and enough threat toward bodily harm to have sedation threats thrown at her by a very attractive nurse (who definitely did not slip her number under the dining tray brought to her. Not at all). But, in the end, her arm was fitted for a soft cast. Mallory relegated her to soft duty, until a vetted professional came to help her through her “traumatic experience”. The stitches would fall out on their own, she was assured. Her face was far more purple and yellow and green than it should be. However, she was free, and that was all that mattered. 

In fact, it was Eve Moneypenny who came to her rescue, gliding into the private hospital wing she had been seconded to, like an angel. In her arms were the keys to Q’s continued existence: a cup of Earl Grey from the boutique tea shop next to her apartment complex, a fresh change of clothes, and a bag containing the arguably more comfortable shoes in Q’s collection. 

“Moneypenny, I bloody love you,” said Q as she shed the papery hospital gown and reached for the articles of clothing Moneypenny was already handing her. The button-up was already pre-buttoned, and it took little finagling to fit it over the soft cast. Next came a pair of soft navy trousers that simply snapped closed. The shoes were basic loafers (“Loafers, Q, really?” Moneypenny bemoaned as Q stuffed her feet into them), the most comfortable things she owned, and the shoes she wore most when on her feet for eighteen hours at a time. 

“I know,” said Moneypenny with a tiny smile, deft fingers braiding back a portion of Q’s hair until it fastened at the nape of her neck. “I’m too good for you.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Q admitted, running a hand through the loosened portions of her hair. “Tell me, have my minions tied R up in a corner and commenced the razing of London town as we speak?”

Moneypenny laughed as she offered her friend an arm to steady her. There had been extensive bruising and a fracture or so at her pelvis and tailbone. Years ago, the knowledge would have crippled Q, struck her burgeoning career to the ground, but that was before Q was Q. Now, she soldiered on, limping carefully and palming the amber vial of pain pills the attending doctor had given her. 

“Well,” mused Moneypenny; they came to the elevator bank haltingly. Q leant forward and leant her eye for the retinal scan that would clear them for entry to Q-branch. “R has decided to live out her days in the sewers beneath the equipment room. Your minions have split into factions in defense of either PC or Mac. And the get well presents from your children have overgrown your desk and made a new one.”

“A new desk?” Q clucked her tongue knowingly. “Oh, dear.”

Moneypenny looked perturbed at Q, who stared at the blinking numbers and letters as the elevator descended. “You don’t sound so worried.”

Q offered a smile as the elevators opened, revealing the pristine whiteness of an intact Q-branch. At once, Moneypenny watched the girl hanging onto her arm decompress, as if a gigantic weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

“Simple, Moneypenny,” said Q. “My minions know which operating system is truly superior.”

Little by little, her glorious minions discovered their leader’s return to her sanctum, and responded accordingly. No sooner had she limped down the stairs to the main thoroughfare (with Moneypenny’s assistance the entire way), minion after minion came at Q, babbling about things that mostly went over Moneypenny’s head: the projects Q had been running while in Austria, the death of Nine Eyes and what that spelt for their department, the projects needing approval for first stage testing. Q took it all in stride, straightening further and further until the limp in her stride was all but imagined. The Quartermaster had been at work for no fewer than five minutes, and she had already been gifted a warm maroon cardigan and her habitual cup of tea by a very exhausted R. It was a far cry from the calm, sedated woman who had been carried into Six by a double-O and his girl of the week not eight days prior. 

“Q,” hazarded Moneypenny, once they were seconded in Q’s office. True to Moneypenny’s word, Q’s desk was no longer full of papers and equipment from double-O agents who (in Q’s words) “understood the severity of budget cuts.”, but were full of gifts. Moneypenny, during her years as a field agent, had left many the chocolate bonbon on the old Q’s desk, exotic gifts from locales far and wide. They were thank you presents that could sum up in so many words what she could not. Thank you for being the voice in my ear. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

Moneypenny, however, had grossly underestimated how loved a handler could be. 

She watched Q sort through the gifts one-handed: a box of sweets from the Indian subcontinent, a bottle of vodka from Siberia, O-mikuji from Japan, and—more valuable than life itself—several casks of tea. These were treated like precious gems, seconded in a drawer that was locked by Q’s own palm print. 

“Q,” hazarded Moneypenny again, watching as the woman placed the amber vial on her desk without so much as a glance at it. Her back was to Moneypenny; she was far too busy stroking her wall-mounted screen to life with a quietly whispered, “Wake up, darling. Mummy’s home.” She seemed oblivious, as if the past two weeks had been nothing more than a nightmare left to her subconscious. Moneypenny knew that the methods Q were employing were far from healthy; she had watched good men and women ignore their hurts, ignore their trauma, only to die by their own hand days, weeks, years later. 

Her eyes darted to the bottle of pain killers, left untouched beside one final gift. 

“Miss Quartermaster,” stressed Moneypenny, no quarter left for wriggle room in her voice. 

Q finally turned around, noting the official use of her title and the frankly annoyed manner of Moneypenny’s tone of voice. Almost absentmindedly, Q’s hand found the bottle that was causing Moneypenny such undue distress, and shoved it unceremoniously into a junk drawer in the recesses of her desk, to be forgotten. 

Her eyes, however, lingered on the final gift that had been buried beneath all the others. 

Moneypenny watched as Q gently picked up the discarded handgun left abandoned on her desk, casted fingers twitching with memory, hoping to bear some of it’s weight. There was a reverence to the way she moved, a deep sadness that burned into Moneypenny, for she felt it too. 

“Walther PPK,” mused Q, barely whispering the words. “7.65 mm, with a delivery like a brick through a plate glass window. Customizable with a Brausch silencer, little damage to muzzle velocity, and biometrically imprinted to work for one…” Here she paused, looked up at Moneypenny with an indescribable look on her face. “Agent.”  
She smiled, almost fond, and deposited the weapon in the small metal bin for returning items to the equipment room. 

“He’s not coming back,” she said, voice piqued, without a hint of question in her voice. 

“No,” said Moneypenny, choosing bluntness over sweetness. “He’s not.”

For a moment, Q’s face was unreadable. She thoughtfully ran her fingers over the area where the Walther had rested until that moment, as if attempting to absorb some sort of impression from it’s final resting place. 

“Is that all, Miss Moneypenny?” asked Q after a moment. 

Moneypenny paused, seriously considering Q. Her expression was closed off, her dark hair like a curtain obscuring what little of her face she could see as Q bent over her desk and touched her palm to the desktop. The biometric authentication ran through on the screen behind her, denoting name, rank, and clearance level. Gone was the sly, clever woman. Here she stood replaced by her automaton counterpart: the Quartermaster. 

“No, ma’am,” said Moneypenny, albeit begrudgingly. 

“If you would be so kind as to send R my way,” said Q in dismissal. “We have much to discuss.”

In the end, Moneypenny accepted Q’s abrupt discharge of company. The branch was an absolute hub of activity, recovering still from the Incident that had claimed the previous Q. A young woman—possibly as young as Q—with a lanyard around her neck denoting her simply as ‘R’ was busy in the thick of it, headset over her ears as she focused on a red dot in the midst of the Serbian wilderness. 

Her eyes briefly flicked to Moneypenny as she approached; it was more courtesy than Q would have shown her. 

“Hold for a moment, 001,” said R. “Keep bearing southeast and you should reach that landing strip in ninety minutes, given your current pace.”

001’s—Angeline St. John, corrected Moneypenny mentally—response was lost as R moved the little microphone out of the way. Her eyes were clear and bright, a brown color not dissimilar to honey. She could see why Q favored the girl, promoted her to R as quickly as she did. 

“Queen wants to see me?” she asked, without being prompted.

“Yeah,” said Moneypenny. She was acutely aware of the nicknames the Quartermaster’s so called ‘minions’ decided to bequeath unto her. Queen was one of the more teasing ones, but when said by R, the word held credence. 

R sighed through her nose and waved her hand at an older man, almost as old as the old Q had been when he…

The man bustled over, scribbling on a tablet with a stylus and barely paying attention to those in front of him. 

“Take over for 001 for a moment, Alec,” said R, handing her headset over to the man, in exchange for the tablet and stylus. “Her Worshipfulness needs me.”

“I’m sure the Quartermaster will appreciate your barbed, pop culture references, R”, said Alec blithely as placed the headset over his ears. 

R settled her gaze on Moneypenny, clutching the clipboard tighter than necessary to her chest. 

“Q seem okay to you?” she asked. It was not in this R’s nature to beat around the bush, especially when the Quartermaster was involved. For a moment, Moneypenny considered lying, considered giving an ambiguous answer. But the girl who served beside Q, who was as new to the position as she had been, deserved more than lies and misdirection. 

“She’s as fine as she wishes to be,” said Moneypenny. 

R made a displeased face, but commented no further. 

“I’ve sent an invoice to M,” she said, already walking towards Q’s private sanctum. “Please be sure he knows the numbers are, in fact, correct.”

Moneypenny watched for a long time. It was a rarity she had so much time to watch the workings of Q branch unimpeded by duty. Her eyes took in the polite knock on Q’s door as R patiently waited for her audience to be granted. The way she slid in as the door opened, not sparing a space for any minion unworthy of entry to view the divine was almost artful. 

There was, in fact, a window. Moneypenny leant against the tabletop that R had vacated, watched the two women come together with the barricade that was Q’s desk between them. They spoke for a bit, sound stopped by both glass and concrete and tile, before Q peeked over R’s shoulder, saw Moneypenny spying. 

Unreadable, she quickly crossed to the window, locked eyes with her friend, and tinted the window. 

.

007 did return, but his convalescence was short, his purpose single-minded. He swaggered into Q branch when the staff was down to nil, when Q was at her tiredest. As soft of a duty Mallory had assigned, it did not stop her from living out of her office for the past three days, subsiding on Earl Grey and parcametol. So it was jarring—though she did not show it—when 007 strode up to her, ever casual and ever classy in his beautifully bespoke suit. 

They spoke little, exchanged pleasantries and snark as befitting a colleague of their nature. He asked to borrow his car, and she obliged. The Aston Martin had been a pet project of hers, originally foisted to a new hire from a security firm (who Q could swear had forged her vet, but that was another story). She, in a fit of unspoken gratitude, took the Aston Martin under her wing, and lovingly restored it to it’s former glory. 

The rocket launcher was, unfortunately, grossly over budget. 

She watched him get in the passenger side, arm aching fiercely and face more yellow and green than normal. Before he closed the door, she said: “Bond.”

He looked up, said nothing.

“Remember your get well present to me?”

It was almost indiscriminate, the smile he gave. But it was there. Q could see it. 

“That’s how I want this returned.”

She left before he could say anything. Before she could see him drive away. 

.

As Queen of Q branch, the Quartermaster was allowed certain liberties that her colleagues were not. An office of white tile and birch floor was her refuge from the madness of what Six called “colleague oriented partnership” and Q branch called “individualized blast radii”. There was a futon in the corner, where Q spent more nights on than not, and two monitors were perpetually running decryption algorithms, path finding software, and surveilling any of the double-O agents currently on her roster (not that the double-O program officially existed, however). Underneath that mass of programming were the little things: the overhaul of the system, running parameter checks on new programming paradigms, the parsing bits of code that could handle themselves (with the assistance of a program written by her, jokingly nicknamed “Q-2” by her minions), and a detailed list of prototypes waiting review and vetting. 

Shamefully, there was an exploding pen thrown in there, and it wasn’t her idea. 

A polite knock on the door barely startled her. Almost forty minutes into her lunch hour, Q had been hoping to catch a quick kip and refill her tea before braving the projects not currently on her ever growing to-do list. But 004 falling off the grid in Kiev and 009 encountering the proponents and facilitators of a child sex ring in Baghdad had cut deeply into those plans. Forty minutes was long enough for her to provide 009 with an exit strategy and a lift (“It’s the bloody desert, 009. Of course it’s going to be hot. Now, take the next left and drive until you reach water.”) and begin to locate a temporarily misplaced 004 (in _Chernihiv_ of all places, the bloody fool), and by that time, her tea has grown exceptionally cold and nigh unpalatable, and her still sore arm was throbbing mercilessly. 

“Come in—not you 009,” called Q, clenching the handle of her Scrabble mug all too tightly. The cast had only just come off, and Q could count on one hand the amount of times she had been home in the weeks between her arrival and then. There was only one driving force that made her crawl her way back to her flat, and they were small and furry and partially dependent on her for survival. 

“Oh, _don’t_ get smart with me,” she spat out, still hosting her one-sided conversation.

The door crept open it’s allocated eight inches, allowing Eve Moneypenny to poke her head in, like a white flag of sorts. Glasses askew, Q spared a moment to look at her friend from up high. Perfectly put together as always, Moneypenny balanced on absurdly expensive stilettos as if she had been born wearing them, and wore her sheathe of a dress like battle armor. What really drew Q’s attention was the addition of a dress bag slung over one arm, and a bag from the Christian Louboutin boutique in Mayfair held in the other. Poised with an additional bag and a gaze that could freeze fire, Moneypenny was as much of a threat to her now as the child sex ring was to 009. 

“No,” was all Q said. Childishly, she turned her back, and glared at the monitor displaying 009’s frantic flight to the Persian Gulf. 

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say,” defended Moneypenny adamantly. The shoe bag went down by the door and the bag with—good God, was that a _hairdryer_?—miscellaneous items taken from her own home went on the futon. The dress bag was lovingly hung up on the door frame, and Q glared at it accusingly. 

“The last time you waltzed in here with the contents of a salon attached to you,” said Q accusingly, “I ended up in the boot of some hacktivist’s car.”

Moneypenny scoffed and took one step closer to Q’s desk. 

Q retaliated and took one step back. 

“This is different,” said Moneypenny, beginning to verge on impatience. 

“If I recall, you said the same thing last time,” countered Q, albeit hysterical. 

“I bought new shoes for you!”

“You don’t even know my size!”

_“Are the shoes beautiful, at least?”_ came 009’s voice over the internal speakers of Q’s office. Moneypenny, for what it was worth, looked surprised. _“If anything, darling, do it for the shoes.”_

Q, with a positively feral growl, snarled at the monitor. “Thank you for your input, 009. Q going dark.”

_“009 going dark. Knock them dead, darling.”_

Q spent an embarrassingly long moment staring at the now-dead feed, trying to control her pulse. Her Scrabble mug was actually icy to touch, and the tea within disgusting. She drank it anyway, just to avoid Eve for a second longer. 

“009, was it?” Moneypenny quipped. “How is she?”

“Agent Scarlett Newgate is well on her way to completing her black-ops mission in Istanbul,” said Q, at her most deadpan.

“Baghdad is an awfully roundabout way to reach Istanbul.”

“Scarlett has always had a horrid sense of direction.”

Moneypenny smiled. “So, the rumors were true. You’re still keeping watch over our double-Os.”

Q guiltily ran a hand through her hair, wincing at the unwashed feel of it slipping between her fingers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a full meal. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the outside of her office. When was the last time she was home? What day was it even?

Moneypenny had said something. It was polite to reply.

“Not all of them,” was Q’s quiet reply, after a pregnant pause. She murmured it so low, Moneypenny almost missed it. Watching the pained slump of Q’s shoulders, Moneypenny sighed.

“Well, it seems I have come just in time,” Moneypenny said. With little pomp and a lot of circumstance, Eve crossed the rest of Q’s office in ground-eating strides, and forced Q into her desk chair. Affronted, Q opened her mouth to protest, used her foot to slide away on her chair, but Moneypenny was there. Her grip on Q’s shoulder was unyielding and just shy of painful, and Q was forced all too quickly to remember that she had been a field agent before becoming Mallory’s—the new M, not her M—personal secretary. 

However, Q wasn’t quite ready to play nice with a professional killer. 

“I’m not going _anywhere_ ,” she snapped. Moneypenny’s eyes widened a fraction in amusement masked as surprise. “009 is in ISIL territory—you know how they love to treat spies, let alone women—and 004 is making his way toward Poland. I think.”

“You think,” drawled Eve. 

“At least that’s what my facial recognition software picked up in Belarus. It’s either Poland or Russia.”

“So it’s absolutely imperative that you stay and see our defunct agents home,” Eve continued.

Q stiffened. She knew, once the MI6 merger went through, the double-O program would remain suspended. But SPECTRE happened, and, while lain off and no longer carrying that legendary license to kill, her agents were still hers, no matter their designations. So if Q wanted to call Scarlett “009”, or Alec “004”, it was her business, not Mallory’s, and certainly not the board’s.

“Yes,” Q said, curt. 

Moneypenny looked strangely satisfied by her answer. 

“Good,” was all she said. Eve loosened her iron grip on Q’s shoulder, but only fractionally. “Now, it’s time to get you cleaned up.”

In a flash, Q sprung out of her chair, spun it between the pair of them, and looked at her friend as if she were prepared to kidnap her herself. 

“What point of “I need to be here for my illegal handling of the double-O program” didn’t you understand?” she asked, voice high in her agitation. 

“Oh, I understood all of it,” said Eve patiently. She darted around the chair, and Q responded by scaling her desk in a feat that would make the gentleman in charge of whipping Q branch into shape proud. “Unfortunately, the Joint Chief of Staff and the Committee for Specialized Intelligence disagrees wholeheartedly.”

That was enough to make Q draw up short, wielding her desk lamp like a bludgeon. 

“Pardon?” was her only reply.

It took everything in her for Moneypenny not to roll her eyes. Q lowered her bludgeon the slightest bit, relaxing her elbows like a pitcher on the mount. The wild-eyed quality left her eyes, but the wariness did not leave her stance. 

“Have you forgotten?” inquired Eve. “You’re M’s expert on the defense for the double-O program, and you’re set to give your testimony in a little under two hours.”

Q scoffed. “I didn’t bloody forget that monkey parade,” she said. “It’s on Wednesday. Today’s only Sunday.”

“It’s Wednesday, actually.”

Skeptical, Q pulled her personal phone out of the pocket of her blazer. 

“So it is,” she admitted begrudgingly. 

Moneypenny looked to the dress bag and small tote (the one Q carried groceries in, when she had the time to do something as domestic as grocery shopping) pointedly. Q followed her gaze, feeling very trapped and very scared, all at once.

“Now,” said Moneypenny, in a voice that garnered no argument. “Usually, one would argue that one hour and fifty-two minutes is usually not enough time to change one from slovenly uni student to Quartermaster.” Eve ignored Q’s indignant “Excuse _you_ ” in favor of walking to the bag in question and removing several items from them. Q bristled at the sight of what looked like an aerosol can, and a bath towel (again pilfered from Q’s own flat). “Then again, those people have never met me. I am, above all things, a miracle worker.

“So, I give you two choices, Miss Quartermaster. Option one: I tie you to that chair of yours and tame your hair into submission with a little dry shampoo and curling creme. I can assure you, only one of us is going to enjoy option one.”

Q swallowed, nervous. “I would agree with you there,” she said.

Moneypenny smiled. “Then I believe you will enjoy option two: taking this towel to the lockers and enjoying your first shower in what smells like a week.”

“You’re allowing me to leave your sight?” Q countered. 

Moneypenny’s smile was frighteningly pleasant. “I never said anything about leaving you to your own devices, darling.”

A lesser woman would have shuddered. Q, however, was not a lesser woman. 

“And what’s so wrong with what I’m wearing?” she asked, looking up her nose at Eve. Sure, the checkered trousers she wore were showing a little wear, and her blouse was a little rumpled, but her blazer was still in fine form, and the bow on her blouse most certainly did not "Droop depressingly", as R had put it two days past.

Eve, however, was unforgiving in her assessment of the Quartermaster’s attire.

“There’s a mayonnaise stain on your lapel, your trousers need to be burned, and your under eye bruises have bruises themselves,” said Eve. 

“My trousers are fine, Moneypenny.”

“There’s blood on them.”

“What’s a little blood?”

“Torture or towel, Q. Tick-tock.”

Q eyed the items in Eve’s hands, fight-or-flight instinct sharp in mind. 

“I’ll take the towel, if you please,” she admitted through clenched teeth.

Eve smiled and extended the towel to the Quartermaster, who took it with an irritated growl. Begrudgingly, she lowered her desk lamp back into place, just in time for Moneypenny to extend to Q a toiletry bag. 

“Shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrush, and bar of soap,” Eve recounted as Q inspected the contents of it. “Contacts and solution are at the bottom.”

“I’m not wearing my contacts for the board,” Q said.

“Yes you are,” said Eve again, in the voice that warned against argument. 

Q sighed and resigned herself to Eve’s ministrations. 

“You’re absolutely wasted as Mallory’s personal assistant,” she admitted, throwing the towel over her shoulder. “I might steal you off his hands.”

“I’m sure I can find someone competent to curtail your less savory habits,” Eve said benignly. “By the way, your cats send their love.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. However, you’ll be receiving the bill for my dry cleaning shortly. Lovelace decided to show her affection on my silk dress.”

Q couldn’t help but smile, even if it was slightly painful. “She always did love spoiling nice things,” she admitted. 

Moneypenny was deadpan as she said: “And Renoir left a dead bird in my pocket.”

“Damn. And to think I was the one he spoiled.” Q checked her phone’s display again. “How many minutes do I have to shower?”

“Twelve, Q. Let’s get a move on so I can start on that nest you call hair.”

.

Exactly one hour and six minutes later found a freshly scrubbed and absolutely changed Quartermaster of MI6 entering a private car beside Miss Evelyn Moneypenny and the new M (whom the Quartermaster almost strictly referred to as Mallory). No longer in clothing that a charity would refuse, the Quartermaster—at the hands of Moneypenny—had undergone a transformation worthy of Cinderella. Dark hair had been coiffed and braided in a loose, yet businesslike manner. Glasses scorned, green eyes were proudly on display, winged with eyeliner and lashes popped with mascara. Lips were neutral in compliment. Her face was less spotty, more artificial. The dress she wore was black, unassuming, and complimented by a white blazer. The shoes were sky high and made her wobble, without Mallory’s hand on her lower back to steady her. But she looked the part, and that was all that mattered to the board. To them, her competence was measured by the quality of her makeup and the length of her skirt. 

“I feel like a bloody show pony,” said Q bitingly. 

“You look fine,” said Eve. 

“I could have shown up in trousers and a blouse, and no one would think any different.”

“Unfortunately, the board thinks otherwise.”

“Because the board are full of misogynistic pricks. I can stay in my pajamas and do more damage than they can ever dream of conjuring up.”

_A raised eyebrow. The only hint of pride._

_“Well, I'll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field.”_

Mallory cleared his throat, growing uncomfortable with the conversation. Q, sullen, glared pointedly out the tinted windows as the car followed the roundabout. For all their supposed eminence as the premier spy organization in the free world, MI6 was subject to the trivialities of traffic patterns. With freshly manicured nails (that Moneypenny did while Q barked directions at an utterly confused 004), Q hacked into the Department for Transport and, with a little nudging, ensured that their drive was unencumbered by red lights.

The car, all too soon, drew to a stop. The director of MI6 patiently awaited the driver, who opened the door a few moments after the car slipped into to idle. Ever the gentleman, Mallory extended his hand for Eve, then Q, to take. It was overcast, and the scent of ozone was sharp in the air. Q looked up at the building they were in front of, mildly confused.

“Thames House?” Q quipped, observing the building home to Britain’s domestic intelligence service. 

Mallory spared a smile. “I assume C want this meeting on home territory,” he admitted. 

Q glared at the statue of Britannia as they entered the building. 

“Well,” she said, showing her identification to the man at security. “I’m afraid that they will remain at quite the disadvantage.”

Behind her, Eve smiled. 

.

Four and a half hours later, Q emerged from the conference room on the upper levels of Thames House, sufficiently wrung out, and more than a little irritated. The Joint Chief had been skeptical at first of her position, politely inquiring her true name and nature at MI6. Naturally, he grew very uncomfortable when she told him to call her “Quartermaster” or “Ma’am”, on punishment of revealing his delightfully uncommon pornography habits to the members of not only the board, but the British Empire. 

From there, the interrogation into MI6’s security, and the procedures for systemic overhaul were called into both account and question in equal measure. Q—with the assistance of diagrams and a delightful presentation she had prepared on the elevator up to the conference room—was able to deter any outside interference with her system. 

Then, the reason why they had gathered in conference came up: the validity of the now-defunct double-O program, and the slim possibility of it’s future. Q, after a very long and arduous defense, finally ended with a sentence she had spoken a long time ago:

“Sirs, every now and then a trigger must be pulled.”

As if she had served a prison sentence, Q stood when bid and left the adjourned committee meeting, passing a nervous looking fellow with a cup of takeaway coffee. More than likely the committee’s next “expert”, the Quartermaster found it in herself to give the boy a comforting pat on the shoulder on her way to the elevator. 

Once ensconced in the glass and metal carriage, Q removed her personal phone from her coat pocket and typed out a single message to Eve:

_You owe me_

Eve’s reply came a few minutes later:

_Not as much as your cats owe me._

Q exited the elevator, and was pleasantly unsurprised to see M still waiting for her in the foyer of Thames House. Given the nature of her testimony, Q knew the man would have stayed perilously close to her, or in chapel praying fervently for the reinstatement of the double-O program. Surprisingly, however, he was unaccompanied by Moneypenny. She was almost used to the woman keeping within the shadow of her boss, and seeing her missing was a truly jarring experience.

“Miss Moneypenny?” she inquired, once she was in earshot.

“Doing her job,” was Mallory’s response. He offered her his arm, and she took it. They walked in silence, passing security, and entering the deluge outside. From somewhere, Mallory produced an umbrella. From afar, one could mistake them for parent and child.

“Q,” said Mallory, as they walked down the stairs, “go home.”

Affronted, Q drew to a halt, almost falling out of the protection of the umbrella.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“Go home,” he repeated. “The day’s been long, and you’re severely into your overtime.”

She sniffed. “I only logged twenty-seven hours this week so far.”

“That you’ve logged. Go home.” He offered her a look. “Don’t make me make it an order.”

Scandalized, Q glared up at her superior—who was still painfully taller than her, even while she wore stilettos—personally offended by his suggestion that she embrace mortality and do the sensible. Like rest. Or allow MI6 to use Windows 10. Or see her cats. Or catch up on Downton Abbey. But he was right, loathe as she was to admit it. 

“For my cats,” she said. 

Mallory, for his credit, looked amused. 

“For your cats,” he echoed. 

Mallory’s driver took her directly home, to the complex that had once been a prison to her. Midway between Thames House and there, between sending orders to R and allowing her to delegate to the remainder of her minions and utilize her power as second-in-charge of Q branch, Q ashamedly nodded off, forehead pressed against the window. She only stirred when the driver woke her with a quiet, “Miss Quartermaster? We’ve reached your destination.”. 

She thanked the man and took his arm as he walked her to her door. The concierge offered her a wan smile as she tottered toward his desk. 

“Long day, Miss Charbonneau?” he asked, utilizing one of her most favored pseudonyms.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Mike,” she answered. 

Q collected her stack of spurned mail in short order and was absolutely drained by the time she dragged herself to the lift, half awake as she punched in her floor number. Decorum was the only thing preventing her from shedding the dress; the shoes were already in hand, removed before she even entered the lobby of the building. Yawning, blinking back reflexive tears, she cleared her security for her flat in record time and pushed the reinforced door open. 

Immediately, the dress came off, and her cats appeared from parts unknown, allowing their displeasure at being abandoned for so long to show in their clamoring meows and the new runs in her stockings. 

“Yes, my loves, I know,” she muttered, gathering her scattered items from the floor as she bent to stroke their heads. 

A postcard immediately caught her eye. 

She had identified the sender immediately, and it brought a wry smile to her face. The thing was a tacky, art deco thing from Monte Carlo. On the back was a few words, with no name attached, but she knew who it belonged to. 009 loved to send her exotic teas from the countries she visits on her missions. 006 always made sure to bring her hand crafted souvenirs. 002, without fail, always deposited foreign sweets in her ‘IN’ box, in lieu of the weapons he was supposed to return. 

007 sent her tacky post cards. 

Twining himself between her legs, Renoir meowed curiously. Q sighed as she rose from the ground, postcard held delicately in hand.

“Don’t give me that attitude, mister,” she scolded affectionately. “Let him send his postcards. It’s not like I miss him, tosser he is.”

Renoir said nothing. Only blinked dubiously. 

Q glared right on back. 

“Even if the board approves the double-O program’s return,” she snapped, “he won’t come back.”

Great. Now she was talking to her cats. 

“Let’s get you something to eat. Traitors.”

Her furballs agreed without complaint, darting into the kitchen where they eagerly awaited feeding. Eve had left a note on her kitchen table, a scrawled thing reminding Q that she would be by tomorrow night to keep her company on her ‘voluntary’ day off. 

Voluntary her arse. 

Later, freshly showered and curled in bad, watching the exploits of the Granthams on her laptop, Q idly stroked Lovelace’s head. She—in an uncharacteristic fit of feline affection—had deigned Q worthy enough to share the bed, and curled herself in the bend made by her knees and stomach. Renoir, ever the aloof one, pointedly lay with his back to the pair, on the pillow beside Q and his sister. 

If Q fell asleep with the postcard tucked beneath her pillow, well, that was just her business, wasn’t it?

.

“This wine is shite, Eve.”

“Hey, I paid a lot for it.”

“Get your money back; it’s horrid.”

“Says you. You’re idea of fine wine is screw top pinot noir from Tesco.”

“Excuse you, it’s good for drinking _and_ cooking.”

Moneypenny eyed Q as frostily as the Dowager Countess was eyeing Missus Crawley onscreen. 

“I never want to hear those words from your mouth ever again, Q,” she said. 

“Your attempt to turn me into a high class lady is failing, Moneypenny,” said Q, sipping form her wine glass through pursed lips. “Just admit it.”

Eve, for her merit, smiled and clinked glasses with Q. 

From her armchair, Renoir let out an offended meow and took off, tail held high in derision. Drunkenly, Q watched him go, retreat to her bedroom. Bastard was probably going to take up her entire bed in recompense. 

“So,” said Eve. “What do you think the board is going to decide.”

Q decided she wasn’t drunk enough for this conversation, and topped up her glass willingly. 

“It’s not my job to speculate, Moneypenny,” she said, albeit snappishly. 

“But if you had to choose.”

Moneypenny could affect a positively wheedling tone of voice when she had to. Q, irritated, snapped: “Well, if I want to keep my job, I guess I’d like them to reinstate the double-O program.”

This pleased her tipsy colleague.

“You know,” she said. “He’d come back if we did.”

Q scoffed, sipped her wine more harshly than she tried. “He drove off into the sunset with her, Moneypenny. He won’t be coming back this time.”

“But you don’t know him like I do.” Moneypenny smiled knowingly at Q, clinked glasses with Q in celebration. Or pre celebration. 

“But I know his type,” Q snapped, irritated. She rose from her seat on the couch and strode to the kitchen, where the leftover Chinese takeaway was. Snagging an egg roll, Q turned to watch Moneypenny, who had drifted off in the midst of the Christmas Special. Wine in hand, egg roll in the other, Q pulled the afghan over Moneypenny. Her empty wine glass had fallen to the floor, rolled on the wood to the end table by the door. Vaguely drunk, extremely tired, the fallen wine glass had already attracted Lovelace’s attention. She took it to be a game, hiding behind a table leg and swatting at the stem with a mitten paw. Amused, Q watched her fluffball at work.

Sensing her audience, Lovelace wrapped herself around the table leg and looked up at Q, eyes wide and ears pricked. Turning on her back, then onto her legs, Lovelace proceeded to stride purposefully to the kitchen, tail high in derision. 

“Cheeky,” Q giggled. Then, she decided she was far too refined to giggle, and stopped. She bent down, scooped up the wine glass, and studied the residue left behind by Moneypenny’s lipstick. Some wine had leaked from the glass, to stain the back of an eleven by seven photo that Q was certain hadn’t been there before.

Perhaps it had fallen out of her mail pile. It had to be there a while for her not to notice it. Curious, Q turned it over, red wine running from the back to trickle down her hand.

Heart in her throat, she studied the subject of the photo. 

Her. 

It was a photo taken earlier that day, of Q—one arm in the sling her doctor ordered her to wear for several weeks more—milling about Alexandra Palace, doing her weekly shopping. It was a shot taken from a wide-angle lens, from a substantial distance. The photo was so detailed, she could see the exact way the sun was reflecting off her dark curls, which had been wound high on the crown of her head, into a messy bun.

Q’s heart pounded in her chest. She was always stringent with her covers, with her identities. It frightened her that someone knew exactly how and when she shopped. It frightened her that someone knew where she lived, knew how to fool the security sensors that flanked her door. A quick check on her tablet confirmed her unfortunate hunch: that her security system had been remotely overridden, and had provided an artificial loop of empty hallway for the past four hours.

Hands shaking, Q placed the photo, upside down, on the kitchen table. Running a hand through her hair, Q poured herself a full glass of wine. The sound of the bottle hitting the wood surface of her table was enough to make Eve stir on her couch.

“Mm?” she hummed, half asleep. She rubbed at her eye and rose her head from the arm of the couch. “Q?”

For a moment, Q looked at the upside down photo on her table, and considered telling the still drunk Eve about the photo. It would head off a great number of complications, but she would sacrifice her principals in order to feel safe. Feel secure. 

In the end, no one hacked Q, threatened Q, and got away with it. That was a promise she made herself, when Q was just a letter, and stress fractures in her feet were the most dangerous thing she ever had to face. And she was not keen on breaking it.

“Q?” Moneypenny called from the living room. “Is everything all right?”

Q drank deeply from her wine glass. 

“Yes, Moneypenny,” said Q. “Everything’s fine.”

.

Three weeks later, at 5:59 in the evening, the Committee for Specialized Intelligence passed down it’s ruling. The merger would complete as dictated, and the double-O program would be reinstated, “With the greatest, and most expedient haste.”.

Three minutes later, at 6:02, when Q branch was at it’s busiest, Q was torn from several different projects at once by the unthinkable. The peace was disturbed by a series of explosions, ripping through the lower bay of Q branch, cracking the foundation, and rocketing upward, engulfing all levels of Six’s experimental technology branch in flames. 

Of the roughly 2,000 employees, ranging from interns to theoretical engineers, 591 were killed instantly. The remaining 1,443 were injured by the explosion itself, or by falling debris. Only 82 escaped injury, by circumstance of not being in Q branch at the time of the explosion. 

At 6:21, Six’s security and disaster relief team swept in, and began S & R procedures. 

At 6:36, Agent Ullmarah located R beneath her desk. She had been thrown by the explosion, crawled under her desk until the explosions had stopped. Q had been in her offices, last she had seen her, almost an hour prior. 

At 7:12, Q branch had been evacuated. Recovery had begun on the 591 murdered boffins struck down by the heinous breach of Six’s security. No one had seen Q, alive or dead, for several hours. 

R refused Mallory’s appointment to Q, at least until they discovered a body. If they discovered a body at all. 

At 3:01 the following morning, Agents Fitzwilliam and Maldonado uncovered Q’s chair beneath a pile of collapsed ceiling. This encouraged the emergency services to horde closer. Encouraged one proactive gentleman to unfold a body bag and begin filling out a toe tag. 

At 5:55, Agent Maldonado found Q. Alive. Unconscious, bleeding from, well, everywhere. But she was alive. 

R smirked at Mallory, as her boss was herded into the operating theatre. And she did not move for thirteen hours. 

At 8:54, Q was moved from theater to intensive care, unable to breathe on her own. 

At 2:00 exactly, two days after the explosion at Q branch, James Bond, former 007, entered Vauxhill Cross. And those in his path knew to move out of his way.


	2. À terre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is actually way more popular than I ever imagined it being. So...thanks guys! 
> 
> A few notes:  
> So [this](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/298856125247079261/) is kind of who I imagined as Q, if women were allowed to do more in Bond films than look pretty. [ The Dumont](http://www.berkeleygroup.co.uk/new-homes/london/albert-embankment/the-dumont?wt.ac=The%20Dumont/) is apparently really gorgeous, and if I had a million pounds, I'd live there. And last, but certainly not least, one of Q's cats Lovelace is based on [ Bernadette ](https://www.instagram.com/p/lQpR5xm_ql/?taken-by=harrietscats/), who won't leave me alone at night.

 

Contrary to the quite extensive betting pool making it’s way around Six would like you to believe, James did not drive into the sunrise, sunset, _whatever _, with Madeline Swann. Well, he did, but they did not stay in each other’s company for long, begin a passionate romantic tryst brought on by the retirement of a prolific assassin. He accompanied her as far as Heathrow, carried her luggage to curbside checkin like the proper gentleman he was, and conservatively kissed her goodbye without even entering the terminal. They shared no words but a smile each, a private moment between colleagues brought together by circumstances too bizarre to name..__

In the end, Madeline returned to Austria, And James… James, however, drives. 

He drove the Chunnel to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he visited the belfry that made the small French village so famous, and mailed a post card to one “Reina Charbonneau”. On the back, quickly scribbled, was a sentence:

_I wonder if the beaches in Nice are any nicer?_

He did make his way to Nice eventually, but only after visiting Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseilles. In each city he stopped at, with his halting French, he purchased a post card for three euros, and inscribed a single line. Sometimes more. Each time he addressed it to the same person: Reina Charbonneau. During his second night in Paris, fantastically drunk on some sweet tasting cognac and lost in the wiles of a small woman with pale skin and dark, dark hair, he inscribed another post card, in hotel ink:

_Remember the Louvre?_

He left France after Nice, circling back to Spain. He enjoyed Barcelona for a while, then the beaches of Gijón. Down he went to Madrid, to Toledo, to Seville, then Gibraltar. For a while, looking across the water of the Mediterranean at Morocco, he considered taxiing his Aston Martin on a ferry boat, and exploring Africa. Post card in hand, pen in the other, he seriously debated tossing both into the sea. In the end, it was as useful as mailing it to the recipient, to be unanswered. 

He wrote another line instead, stuffed it into a post box almost absentmindedly on his way back to his parked Aston Martin:

_Africa’s too warm this time of year anyway. I’ll be in Switzerland next._

Switzerland was utterly uneventful. He stopped in Zürich, mailed a post card inquiring about Lake Como. In Como, he sent another while lounging on the beautiful beach with a sun kissed man beside him. This one complained about the Alps, complained about the food, complained about the company. He left later that night, slinking out of bed, as if it—as if that beautiful man on the beach—was simply another mission. 

Dipping into Italy, he explored Milan, wandered her streets for a day or so. It was in Milan that he heard the whisperings of Six reinstating the double-O program. It was in Milan that he could feel his skin begin to crawl once more. 

He left Milan, got into his Aston Martin and drove for Germany. He passed through Lichtenstein and Austria, sent a post card from each. These were inquiries about Charbonneau, asking how she was, how her cats were doing, how her children were faring. Longer than his others, he almost considered calling her. 

Almost. 

James enjoyed rainy Munich and the solemnity of Nuremberg. He stopped by Frankfurt, and from there, kept driving northwest until he reached the Netherlands. James remembered her mentioning something about the Netherlands, about wanting to go (“Drive, of course. You’ll never see me on a plane, 007. Not in your lifetime.”). But she did step foot on a plane. And where had that gotten her? Beaten near to death, almost baked alive in a solar oven, and made a murderer. 

True, she had saved his life, taken the shot when she otherwise would never have. But this was Charbonneau—this was _Q—_ who could hurt, maim, _destroy _from thousands of miles away, but never be the one to pull the trigger herself. He had stayed long enough to watch her putter along, come back swinging from her stay in hospital. Then he fled.__

Amsterdam, however, was as beautiful as he imagined it to be. Instead of tacky and touristy, he selected a local artist’s work to send home to Q instead. He was certain she would enjoy it. 

It was in Amsterdam, at 8:00 in the morning six weeks into what was beginning to look like a legitimate retirement, James received his British newspaper in his room, prompt as ever. He paid it no mind for the time being as he dressed in more casual clothing and prepared to have another walk around the neighborhood. Only absently did he flick the half folded paper open, as a second thought on his way out the door. 

On the front page was a photo of the smoking Vauxhall Cross building. The headline declared the tragedy as such:

“GAS EXPLOSION DEVASTATES SIS. HUNDREDS DEAD”

James checked out exactly eight minutes later, and, for the first time in almost two months, his destination was London.

.

Vauxhall Cross was officially closed, pending investigation and repair. James found that out the hard way when he arrived in London five hours later. Once he was officially on British soil again, he dialed Q’s personal number. Like the last thirty-seven times he had called, there was no answer. The polite, automated voice was sure to let him know that the phone was no longer in service. This time, however, he dialed Moneypenny straight after. 

She picked up on the third ring. 

“Bond?” she inquired without preamble, exhausted. It sounded like she had been awake for days. She probably had. “I would say I was surprised, but I’m not.”

“What happened?” Ever the double-O, he needed to know the details, the reason behind the madness. He needed to know if Q was…

Moneypenny sighed on the other line. 

“Right now? You know about as much as I do. M’s in conference with C down at Thames House; we’ve been moved to temporary lodgings on Downing Street, which I know Q won’t be happy about.”

Q was alive. Or she was alive enough to be displeased at the displacement. Bond let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding and relinquished his punishing grip on the steering wheel.

“So I should head to Downing Street, then?” he asked, already turning to head toward the seat of domestic Britain. “Start the ball rolling on my requalifications?”

Again, Moneypenny paused. This time, he thought he heard the quiet sound of weeping on the other line.

“Eve?” James hazarded.

“James,” said Moneypenny. “Come to Royal Marsden. We’ve medevacked the most critical here—being treated by our doctors—but…”

She trailed off, blew her nose. Bond found himself clenching the steering wheel again as he followed a roundabout.

“It’s Q. She’s just gotten out of surgery. It..the doctor’s aren’t sure—”

Bond didn’t hear anything else. He had already hung up, and executed the most illegal U-turn of his career. A normally twelve minute drive took him eight minutes, and he was heading toward the Critical Care Unit less than five minutes after he had parked his car. Well, deemed the Aston Martin worthy enough to be parked. He seriously considered leaving it in the ‘no loading’ zone to be towed away, at Six’s expense. Once inside, the matron in charge was more than happy to direct him to the MI6-owned private ward, direct him to the recalled double-O agent and traditional field agent stationed outside the doors leading to Mansfield House. 

James lingered for a moment, staring up at the name inscribed above the doors. The pain lingered in his chest for a long moment, then dissipated as he clamped down on it, rough as could be with his emotions. The field agent at the door (nameless and forgettable) immediately granted him passage, opened the door for him. 

“Q,” was all he said, once he was within Mansfield House. “Show me to the Quartermaster.”

Before the agent could even move, before the double-O (008, if he wasn’t mistaken) could question him, Moneypenny rounded a corner, a defeated slump to her shoulders, exhaustion in every tense line of her body. For a moment, James was convinced she was going to walk by him, remain focused on the takeaway cup of coffee in her hand. But she didn’t. 

Across the hall, their eyes met. Overwhelmed, Moneypenny’s stoic façade broke; she covered her mouth with her hand as her face crumpled, then recovered, then crumpled again as she stifled sobs. She was by his side in moments, clenching the styrofoam cup hard enough to warp.

“Thank _God,_ ” she breathed out, caught between embracing him and slapping him. “We didn’t think you’d make it.” Moneypenny looked at who James assumed was 008. “It’s all right, Alonso. You can stand down. I’ll escort him from here.”

005, not 008 then. 008 didn’t look pleased, but he acquiesced to Moneypenny easily enough. Alonso Antell was known for respecting those with power, without heed to rank. Needless to say, James didn’t merit high in 008’s eyes. 

“Yes, ma’am,” said 008, almost demure. He stepped away from James, returned to his post at the door. Their dismissal was evident; Moneypenny led James forward at a brisk pace. 

“The intelligence community is up in arms,” said Moneypenny, without preamble. “First Silva taking our legs from beneath us, then Nine Eyes, and now this?” She sighed as they passed more armed security on their way to an elevator bank. “M’s death was the end of an era; none are too pleased at this series of massive breaches in our security, after her death. They think we’re weak, vulnerable.” Again Moneypenny sighed as they entered the elevator. “They may be right.” 

James felt another sharp stab of grief, but masked it elegantly enough. 

“Where was the bomb detonated?” he asked. 

The elevator was quiet for a moment while Moneypenny collected her thoughts. Debated whether or not to read him in.

“A service shaft that buried between the foundation of the building and the sewer below. Sixteen charges total, from the underground to right below Q’s office.”

Q. The elevator doors opened, and Moneypenny guided him forward again, guiding him past several Q branch boffins in closed off rooms, hooked up to machinery that breathed, thought, _lived_ for them now. Those who could return to work already had, taken up residence in Number 10 with great hesitance. They were like Dorothy Gale: taken from their home in a whirlwind of dust. Q branch’s tornado happened to be made of fire, but the point stood. There were those awaiting transplants for ruptured livers, destroyed lungs. There were those in coma, where the waiting game had to be played.

Then, there was Q. 

 Moneypenny paused outside of a nondescript door at the end of the hall. It was empty, save a burly security guard in a magnificently tailored suit stationed at the end of the hall furthest from them. She looked up at James—which was no small feat for a woman of her height—then down at her cooling takeaway coffee. 

“I want to tell you what the doctors told me, what R told me,” said Moneypenny seriously, “before you go in there, expectations high.

“She’s very hurt, James. Austria didn’t help matters much—” here, James flinched imperceptibly.”—and now, with this…” Moneypenny ran a hand through her hair. “She was buried under all that rubble for nearly a day. No one knows how she’s alive, how she survived when the bomb detonated almost right beneath her feet. There’s organ damage, burns, broken bones. There was a bleed in her brain and the doctors are afraid she isn’t going to wake up.” She sighed, shaky, and swallowed tears. “Are you prepared for this, James?”

He wasn’t. He was a thousand things, but prepared was not one of them. Q was untouchable, a queen shielded behind tall, sterile battlements and a moat of cyberspace. Nothing could touch her, nothing could _survive_ after the event, because if she did not catch them, than he certainly would.

Then, Austria happened. Now, this. 

Moneypenny reached out slowly to clasp his arm, a supportive gesture that he appreciated. 

“I’ll go tell R you’re here with her,” she said. _Give you time alone_ was left unsaid. James watched her head back toward the elevator bank, sipping her takeaway coffee almost absentmindedly. He stayed that way, long after she had gone, something sickeningly similar to fear clouding his judgment. 

Eventually—hours, seconds, _days_ —later, he gathered the courage to enter the room. 

It was a private suite, the soft whoosh of a ventilator and gentle beeping of her heart. Q looked diminished against the white hospital linens, tucked away like some sort of fairy tale princess. Her lips were chapped, the tube taped securely in place as machines breathed for her. Q’s face was bruised, cheek broken and skin sutured together. There was an extensive burn from left shoulder to somewhere beneath her gown. Bandaged in soft, white gauze, it made her injuries look trite, contained, _harmless._

James settled in the uncomfortable chair beside her. She didn’t stir. 

Eventually, a doctor came to speak with him, came to check on Q. He was nice, polite, and most of the things he said went through James’s brain like a sieve. He did catch one or so details while the doctor tested her reaction to external force. 

She wasn’t brain dead. Her score hovered between seven and nine. Suboptimal at best, but James knew Q, and Q loved beating odds. The odds, however, of her waking were slim, and they grew slimmer every day, every hour she did not improve. 

He let out a small breath through his nose that was not a sigh. Eventually, the doctor left, and he and Q were alone. Casting his gaze toward the tube in her mouth, the catheter in her elbow, the meter on her finger, James let out one very succinct interpretation of events:

“Shit.”

.

 He remembers Austria clearly. His memory is almost as untouched as Q’s, but Q refused to acknowledge the trauma, the hurt, except in those long hours spent in darkness, clinging to James like a life raft cast out in stormy darkness. So it fell on James to recount, to debrief, to _remember._ And if there is one thing he does not wish to do, it is remember. 

James can remember exactly how it felt to almost die, to escape death by a hairsbreadth. He remembers turning, seeing Q trembling against the wall of the solar oven, hissing breath through a mouthful of blood and clutching the misplaced handgun in a single, trembling hand. She wasn’t awake long, he remembers; but her eyes found his, haunted and scared, aware of her actions just long enough for them to make a lasting impression.

James can remember the weight of her in his arms, the skinny boned-ness of her. It was the one blessing on that long helicopter ride back to rural Austria, the fact that she remained unconscious. She didn’t stir until he had carried her through the empty hotel halls, knocked on the door to his room. Q had let out a pitiful whine, riddled with agony, and that was enough for Madeline to open the door, retreat to her lock-off to fetch her old-fashioned sawbones bag. 

“Can you help her?” he asked, settling Q flat on the singular bed. 

“I’ll damn well try,” Madeline answered tersely. She snapped a pair of purple latex gloves on either hand with a stunning sort of finality. James forgot that she wasn’t just a doctor of the mind, but a doctor of the body as well. 

That, he realized, was a secret blessing. 

James watched as Madeline tended, healed, palliated. He helped her set the broken bone in Q’s forearm, propped her against his side so Madeline could bind her shattered ribcage. Q’s head ended up on his left thigh, hair pulled away from the bleeding skin behind her ear as Madeline expertly sutured the gash that tacked her hairline with blood. 

Here she paused to regard him without looking. 

“I need you to watch her,” she had said. “Watch for extensive bruising behind the ear. I doubt any complications will arise, but if they do—”

“No hospitals,” James said, voice like ice. 

Madeline answered him with a voice that was just as icy. “Without a hospital, she may die if she begins to hemorrhage internally.”

James had the courtesy not to grace Madeline answer.

Finally, Madeline retreats to examine Q’s bloodied and bruised face, palpate the swollen skin around her eye. She tsked, stood just as Q began to stir, let out a hiss of breath. Immediately, James froze, hand stilling in Q’s hair. She shifted, let out another hiss, breath hitching as her brain began to process the unfamiliarity of her surroundings, the still-untreated pain. But before James could say anything remotely comforting, Madeline was there, softly touching Q’s relatively undamaged shoulder. 

“Q?” she inquired in a gentle voice. “My name’s Madeline. You’re safe now. I’m going to help you.”

Still wary, eyes open barely a sliver, Q tried to turn to face Madeline, let out an aborted yelp instead, and stilled. 

“007?” Q whispered. 

“Q,” James answered, vaguely stroking his thumb over the fresh sutures in her skin. Q relaxes a bit at the comforting motion. “She’s backup.”

At that, Q relaxed further into the bed, wheezing on her breath. Q was a veteran player of the game; she knew her place as well as everyone else. If Madeline Swann was the backup, and Q the puppeteer, and James her favored player, than all the pieces were accounted for. The mission had not failed. She had not failed. 

“I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,” said Madeline quietly to Q. “If you could just tell me how you’re feeling, first?”

For a moment, all Q can do is wheeze in pain. Her lips spasm in something that may be a grimace, may be a smile. 

“Well,” she whispers, breaths coming harshly. “I hurt quite a lot, Dr. Swann.”

Madeline laughs quietly. Q is tense against the pillows and blankets, fighting pain, fighting rest, Madeline can see that much with her doctor’s gaze. Quiet, she looked up at James, deadly serious.

“James,” said Madeline quietly. “Reach into my bag and take the vial labeled roxanol out, as well as a syringe.”

“What are you giving her?” James inquired, terse.

“Morphine.”

James almost wants to say no, deny Q palliative care on the grounds that the Quartermaster must be aware enough to tie her own shoes, in case the needed to flee the hotel on short notice. But Q is in pain, and if there is one thing James cannot do, it is let his Quartermaster suffer. 

So James retrieves the vial and a prepackaged syringe, hands them both to Madeline, who doses expertly and cleanly. The needle slides into the flesh of Q’s bicep, and James watches Q tense against the new pain, the new intrusion. 

“She’ll start to feel better in about a quarter of an hour,” Madeline said, voice low. She placed the discarded syringe in a small plastic container (surprisingly, she carried no biohazard bag on her). “I’m going to get ice for that broken orbital bone of hers.”

James watches her go, wary. Madeline paused as she reached the door, looking over her shoulder at James. 

“Don’t worry, Mr. Bond,” she said, quite icily. “I’ll be sure to shout for help if a bellhop decides to murder me as well.”

And then she is gone.

.

He spent that first day in London alone, desperately missing that acerbic voice in his ear, remembering Austria with damning clarity.

Q recovered in fits and starts. Her score on this mythical coma scale James had never heard of before fluctuated between good numbers and bad numbers. When the nurse or doctor would palpate and prod and inspect, they scored Q on her responses to such stimuli. One hour, she could be an eight. Another, she could be four. Then, she could jump up to nine. With each new score, each new rating, James’s hope rose a little more. 

R was his most constant companion. She drifted in and out of Q’s room like a ship lost at sea, unable to find shore without a lighthouse. Without Q. She was kind enough to bring James lunch, bring him coffee (black, two sugar, boiling hot). Sometimes, she stood by the window, back to Q, listening to the ventilator breathe for her. Others, she whispered prayers to herself in what James believed was Farsi. In the dead of night, if James was still awake, they would talk. Mostly it was inane things, like the newest gossip in the _Sun,_ or how Q branch was holding up at their new location in Number 10. James had no gossip to share, beside the status of poor Lovelace and Renoir, who missed their tolerated flatmate 

That first day was hell. He wouldn’t admit it, but it was. It was a day full of undrunk coffee and untouched food. It was a day being interrogated by a shockingly frazzled and short tempered M. James didn’t know what M was saying because it didn’t matter, paled in comparison to Q, who did not stir, did not breathe independently.

Then, the night came, and it was quiet. So, so quiet.

Silent as the grave. 

_“You know, 003 asked me once why I read him the paper while he was having sex for the good of the mission. Mostly, it was to annoy him. But I knew Sean, and I know how badly he missed England. So I would open up the morning paper and read to him, when he wasn’t lost, or his mission hadn’t gone tits up.”_

_“You don’t read to me.”_

_“No, I don’t.”_

Q, James realized much later, did something far more special. She rearranged traffic patterns, kept her birds’ eye on him through cell phone cameras, surveillance equipment, the blood that ran through his veins. In the dead of night, when he was so lonely that booze and sex no longer quieted his mind, she was the voice in his ear. 

He didn’t realize it, but he’d become acquainted with the boffin’s voice.

The second day saw a rise in doctors, a rise in nurses, a rise in vetted experts who poked and prodded and made James aware just how rare it would be for Q to wake up. That Traumatic Brain Injuries were tricky little bastards. That Q’s chances of waking had all but plummeted off a sharp cliff once that blessed twenty-four hour mark had up and gone. 

When R wasn’t there, Moneypenny was: talking to doctors, asking questions, demanding answers that James refused to give. But alas, no amount of threats, of leverage, of power, could wrangle the answers out of a human brain. The doctors knew it. James knew it. Moneypenny knew, but did not admit. There was no way of knowing when—or if, whispered that traitorous part of James’s mind that he most certainly paid no heed to—Q would wake up. There was no way of knowing how she would be affected if she did.

The specialists who spoke to Moneypenny mentioned a veritable toilet paper list of complications that could arise if Q ever woke up again. She could suffer problems with memory, with speech, with vision, with balance. Q could suffer mood swings. There was the very strong possibility that her very personality could be altered beyond recognition. But they assured Moneypenny (and Bond, through her) that the most likely issues Q would face would be cognitive: attention, concentration, information processing. Those were what Q prized most about herself, and the very though that they could be gone upon awakening chilled James to the core. 

Would she know? He wanted to ask. Would she know—if she woke up a completely different woman—would she know what she had lost? A specialist answered his question through Moneypenny hours later, when Q dipped back down to a dreadfully subpar five. There were times when people awoke from comas completely changed, but unaware. They lived in denial of their original selves, unable to compare new, post-injury behaviors with supposed pre-injury ability. They were unable to accept what had changed, what had been sacrificed on the road to recovery. In a way, James gathered that fate, the ignorant fate, to one where Q would be forever tantalized by the woman she once was. But it was impossible to tell fact from fiction. They would see if she woke up. When she woke up.

Day passed into night, and James stayed in that uncomfortable hospital chair. Watching. Waiting for his Quartermaster’s glorious return. The same figures rotated in and out of Q’s room: doctors, nurses, Moneypenny, R, but he stayed. He stayed almost as still as Q, like a predator waiting to strike. Sometimes, when they were alone, James let Q know about his grand European adventure in those short months of retirement. He left only when pressed to shower, eat, fuck until he couldn’t feel. He would be replaced by R in those moments, by a girl as young as Q who could not accept the appointment to Quartermaster when the real Quartermaster, _his_ Quartermaster, could still be alive.

He respected her deeply for that. 

R would try to talk to him, and for Q’s closest friend, James made an effort. He concentrated on words, thought of eloquent things to say, pushed past the fog of denial, the fog that said that what had happened hadn’t really happened. That the explosion had been a figment of his imagination. That said “ _Q will call you at four in the morning asking for a six letter word starting with the letter ‘v’ for a crossword puzzle_ ”. That what had happened was a horrid nightmare, dreadful no doubt, but not real in any sense of the word.

R did give up after a while. When she saw James fading, eyes lingering on the motionless body in the hospital bed. There was sympathy in her eyes, as well as tears in the weaker moments. Even though the pair were so close, R still smiled and patted James on the shoulder. She had read the reports, seen the debrief file made by all surviving members of the explosion (now a paltry 1,109). She had dug around the still-smouldering remains of Q branch for any sign of the perpetrator, knew at a molecular level what had been done, knew what James had given up by returning at the first sign of danger. She knew it all.

Six days and seven nights. James had given himself one final day before going home. Going home and accepting that Q was more than likely gone. That the body lying before him, dependent on machines, was just that: a body. It was no longer his Quartermaster. It would never be his Quartermaster ever again.

James had given himself seven days. One week. One week to hope, and pray to a God he didn’t know existed, didn’t know was listening, for a miracle. Yet still he prayed.

The doctors let R know, and Bond through her, that after seven days the ten percent chance of recovery that James was banking on shriveled to three. Ten percent was quite good. In the realm of espionage, in the double-O program, ten percent was still doable, equivalent to a solid ninety percent. Ninety-five, even. There was still hope, with ten percent. There was still hope that Q would open her eyes and still be her.

James didn’t want to think about the alternative. Didn’t want to call another person ‘Q’ ever again.

So he sat. And prayed.

.

She dreamed. 

She dreamed of that practice room from a lifetime ago. Of pain in her feet, and satisfaction in every step, every graceful movement. She dreamed of the Royal Ballet, and the prestige that came with such a posting. She did not dream of Russia. She did not even dream of New York, of Lincoln Center. She dreamed of the stage graced by the ballerinas of the Royal Ballet, and her place amongst them. One day. 

But that was a lifetime ago. That was when Q was just a letter, and she had a name. A family. A future. 

The dream changed. Became jumbled. She remembered a disjointed volley of information, of light and heat and a noise like thunder. The earth crumpling under her very feet. Sea meeting sky in cataclysm. 

The darkness. 

Then awareness that was not really awareness. A twilight, one could say. She could feel a hand on hers, squeezing gently. Lying prone, breathing, but not. Not Austria, not close to Austria. 

Hesitant, she reached out, followed those ghost sensations, reaching, reaching, reaching…

.

James imagined it. There was no other explanation for the slight twitch of skin against his. A muscle spasm, involuntary and no more. It was his imagination, his blind hope. His belief. He was almost certain, though, and Moneypenny was quick to see his hesitation, his belated joy. 

“James?” she asked, hesitant. 

He turned to Moneypenny, self-doubting and hoping.

“I think her hand just moved,” he whispered, out of fear of it being untrue. 

With bated breath, the pair watched Q for hours, James’s hand interlaced tightly with Q’s unresponsive fingers. He waited, uncertain, afraid; hope was such a dangerous emotion, but he had gone so long without hope, so long.

It didn’t happen again for several hours. Moneypenny had gone limp and despondent in the chair opposite once again, managing M’s empire from her cell phone with an absent-minded forgetfulness. James, however, was intent on Q, intent on the Quartermaster’s frantic climb to consciousness. 

Her fingers flinched in his hand, tightened, a minuscule force of pressure.

Moneypenny gasped, watched the skin around her undamaged eye twitch almost spasmodically. 

James was the first to reach for the call button, summoning the crowd, letting out the alarm that the Quartermaster was not lost, that she may still yet survive. That she was coming back. He did not think about the many specialist’s words, that progression up that damned coma scale did not guarantee any sense of awareness. That Q could remain trapped on any point of that scale, remaining there, lost in the confines of her mind for months, or even years.

Evening came on the seventh day, and Q was far more responsive. She shifted uncomfortably in bed, thrashed when touched, murmuring incoherently. Occasionally her eyes would open, but there was no sign of lucidity. Her gaze would track aimlessly around the room, unsettled, before her eyes would shut once more and more gibberish would spill from her lips.

Apparently, her confusion and agitation were to be expected. That did not prepare James for the possibility of Q attempting to clumsily remove her IV line, remove the tube in her throat that helped her overtaxed lungs breathe. But the tube came out hours later, near sunrise, and James allowed that little seed of hope in his chest a chance to germinate. He let it bloom to cautious, tentative optimism. He was still prepared for crippling disappointment, but hope was paramount in his mind.

“She’s made it very far,” said one specialist on his hourly rotation. “If she’s made it this far, she’s very likely to progress even further.”

Moneypenny asked something, followed by an extremely anxious R. The doctor tutted in response. 

“I’m sorry, but the human brain doesn’t work the way television would like us to believe. People don’t magically snap out of comas. The brain isn’t like a light switch, or a computer you’ve just restarted. It needs time to reorient, to heal.”

James tuned out the doctors and Moneypenny, and R. His sole focus was Q, the way she shifted in bed, the way her face contorted as she struggled toward consciousness. Struggled back to awareness. He was an assassin; it was his job to study his targets. Watching every move made by the Quartermaster—who had yet to acknowledge or recognize him—made that little seed of hope grow more.

That night, on the eighth day, James slept in a bed for the first time in more than a week. Admittedly, the bed was a roll away cot that the staff at the Royal Marsden were more than happy to relinquish, and he didn’t technically leave the building. But Moneypenny sat with her, and James didn’t trust himself to unthinkingly take Q’s hand, as was frighteningly becoming custom. Being touched agitated her, and James knew via specialists that brain injury patients frequently misliked being touched. 

Sometimes, said one specialist, those who suffered TBI mistook those short moments of contact as pain. 

Too soon was it to judge who was returning. If the person who would (because she would, James had no doubt in his mind) return would be like the Quartermaster they knew. Would she despise Earl Grey (a travesty) or take up coffee (a sin)? Would she forget the marvelous world of coding, or take up a different hobby. Would she even remember her time at Six? That scared Bond; he knew the station of Quartermaster was not one normally retired from. Termination of contract oftentimes meant termination of a far more permanent sense. It seemed wrong, on an instinctual level, to murder a woman who may not even know who she was, once she opened her eyes.

On the eighth full day, one day since MI6’s Quartermaster began the long drag back to consciousness, James Bond was escorted from the Royal Marsden, taken in a black town car to Six’s new location at 10 Downing Street, and granted permission by a very cautious Mallory to pursue requalification “immediately”. James didn’t question orders, just followed the psychiatrists and answered their questions. Performed the physical tests. Underwent testing on the field, on the shooting range, in his mind. He answered questions succinctly and politely, and did everything that was bade of him to do.

Three days later, he received (again) his license to kill.

Four days later, Q awoke.

.

“I don’t understand why they won’t leave me alone,” said Q to Mallory, three days after she woke. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Mallory looked down on Q, eyebrow quirked with barely masked derision. The girl was on oxygen, cannula assisting still-struggling lungs damaged by the blast. Moneypenny had been kind enough to braid her hair back, over her ear. She looked the part of disgruntled Uni student; he had never had the pleasure of seeing her at what Moneypenny had called “frat house-chic”. To him, the Quartermaster was an enigmatic figure who favored flats and trainers over stilettos, who slept in her clothes and smudged the makeup around her eyes the longer she stayed at Six’s behest. 

“ ‘Perfectly fine’ warrants coma in your book?” he quipped acerbically.

That seemed to take the heat out of Q’s argument, made her slump back against the bed like a scolded child. Most of the injuries sustained from Austria had been compounded, and newer, more irritating problems had risen. Headaches became commonplace, and the frightening issues with aphasia remained, though they did diminish with each passing day. The hospital offered a speech pathologist, whom was sent marching by an infuriated Q, who shouted in English, French, and swore quite proficiently in Italian, until she couldn’t breathe. 

Moneypenny didn’t like that, much. R, however, was extremely impressed. 

Q offered Mallory her most scathing glare.

“I’m needed at work,” she spat. “C has us exactly where he wants us. I need to know where we stand.”

“The only thing you need,” said Mallory, with more patience than he felt, “is rest. Which you will be getting in _droves_.”

Q balked, as if the very idea was sacrilegious. 

“But—”

“No. My orders come from on high.”

She didn’t need to ask whose orders Mallory was referring to. She had a fairly decent idea as to who was beginning interference in her personal life. Again. But instead of fighting it, drawing out the answer like a splinter, Q relaxed begrudgingly against the hospital bed and crossed her arm—the one that wasn’t in a sling. 

“If you’re going to relegate me to this _nursing home_ ,” Q said, snide, “then I want my glasses. And my phone.”

“Both destroyed.”

“Then procure me replacements. I’m hardly any help blind.”

Mallory stared at Q, who stared back unflinchingly. 

“Moneypenny will bring them around,” said Mallory. 

Satisfied, Q straightened a little, pain spiking unpleasantly as her re-fractured tailbone and newly damaged pelvis both protested the movement. Mallory made an aborted attempt to assist her in her movement, but Q was already resettled by the time he made up his mind. 

“How did this happen?” she asked. 

“We don’t know,” answered Mallory blandly. Diplomatically. 

“No cameras, no sensors, nothing?”

“All looped. All overridden.”

Q felt an itch in her mind, one she couldn’t quite get to. There was something about Mallory’s sentence that rung a bell, a distant one at most. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t grasp what was bothering her. The specialist she saw most often—a lovely woman in her early thirties—was more than keen to let Q know that amnesia was not uncommon with those who suffered from traumatic brain injury. What bothered Q, however, was the fact that this nonverbal issue with recollection was so new. Two weeks ago, she would have been able to retrieve that piece of information without issue.

Two weeks ago, she hadn’t been almost blown up.

“Well,” Q said, mildly irritated at herself. “What can you tell me?”

Mallory paused, obviously torn between telling her and not. But the look Q leveled him with changed his mind. Her temper was still recovering from getting blown to pieces, after all.

“The blast trajectory was…laudable,” begrudged Mallory, as if giving terrorists compliments was almost as damning as taking his tea without milk. “According to your employees more familiar with pyrotechnics, charges were set along a service tunnel that ran from the bedrock into the sewer below, to the emergency tunnels directly below your office. They—”

“Created a funnel,” finished Q, who was apparently unbothered that terrorists had staunchly attempted to explode her in particular. “Like a fireplace flume.”

“R said something similar when she showed me the data.”

Q gnawed on her thumbnail thoughtfully. 

“Tell Moneypenny to get me copies of the data retrieved by Q branch,” she ordered. 

“Not going to happen.”

“I’m sorry?” Q stiffened, irate. “I need to look at the data dump, before you hand it over to C and those pissants at Five.”

Mallory, however, was unfazed. 

“R has already put her best people on it,” he said, stern.

“With all due respect, sir, I wasn’t put on it.”

“I won’t be fighting you on this, Q,” said Mallory. “When you’ve been cleared for active duty, we’ll revisit the matter.”

Q opened her mouth to fight Mallory’s decision, but her lungs chose that moment to rebel. Bending over with a wheeze, Mallory was efficient as he removed the nasal cannula, replaced it with the oxygen mask that was slowly beginning to be needed less and less. Taking a few sterile breaths, Q glared at Mallory, but the heat was gone from her gaze. 

She removed the mask, breathing heavily. 

“This changes nothing,” she said.

“I doubt it will be,” said Mallory. Suddenly awkward, he patted her uncomfortably on the shoulder. “Get some rest, Q.”

Q didn’t fight him. She merely closed her eyes, and drifted off.

.

Moneypenny appeared like a ghost, depositing a fresh pair of glasses (miraculously made in the hours that had passed) and a new cell phone. When Q awoke, freshly medicated and oxygen mask still in place, she could see their blurry appearance on a nightside table. Exhaustion paramount, Q reached over and grabbed her glasses first, snapping the arms open with a flick of her wrist. Once they were resettled, Q blinked as her eyes struggled to adjust to not only the dark, but the sudden clarity. 

The cell phone was next. Scarily enough, her thumbprint was already synced to open, and the pass code was one Q used often (in fact, it was the pass code from her old cell phone, the one that had been tragically blown up). Unsurprisingly, there were a few text messages from pre-installed numbers. 

Moneypenny wished her well, and said she’d drop by when Q was awake. To that, Q replied: _I sleep often enough. But if you bring me back from the hospital, you’ll get Thai food._

Not five minutes later, Q received a notification from snapchat (when did she download snapchat?). Opening it, Q looked at the photo of Moneypenny’s takeaway-laden desk. It was Wednesday, that meant Italian night. 

Attached was a single line of text: _You can pay me in pad thai._

Q smiled, and did not reply. Snapchat was beyond her. Q loved receiving them, loved watching the explosions of her engineering corps, R’s irritated face, creepy closeups of Q tearing into the double-O of the day. But sending them? No, thank you.

The second text was from a burner number, and Q was prompted to delete it, until she read it. It was not a postcard, but the thought was still there. Beside, the last few postcards that had been sent were unfortunately unrecoverable. 

_Argentina_ , was the single line of text. 

Q hesitated before replying:

_Hope it’s warmer there. Sorry, by the way. Your last few postcards are a bit…blown up._

Bond didn’t reply. She didn’t expect him to. 

Her phone vibrated, and Q looked at the newer text. Again, it was another burner number, but this one was, unfortunately, familiar:

_Security’s appalling where you are._

Bastard didn’t even need to sign it off. Q glared as she fired off a final text:

_I didn’t even know you could text, or is this your secretary._

Once sent, she blocked the number. If he really wanted to, he could get ahold of her. 

Settled against the bed, Q stared off into the dark, too tired to drift off. Too tired to move. She considered surfing the internet, changing traffic patterns for Moneypenny on her way home, but she couldn’t gather the motivation. She considered hacking the data dump, but—in a very roundabout fashion—she promised Mallory otherwise. 

Her phone vibrated again, made a different notification noise. Q flipped it over, looked at the lit screen squintingly. She half expected to see a new text from a different number, scathing and calling her by _that name_. But it wasn’t. It was a blocked number, untraceable (she tried). Her heart rate shot up, made her nurse come running, for fear her heart was failing again. The nurse was kind, settling her back, pushing a needle full of some relaxant into her IV line. The cell phone made it’s way back to the nightside table. Her glasses went atop it. But still Q could not erase the message from her mind.

It had simply read:

_See you soon, Cygne._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, you can find me on [tumblr](http://thirtythird-academic.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chute de la Danseuse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec and Q bonding time! Don't worry, 007 will show up and be delightfully emotionally constipated when time comes (more like when I get around to editing this chapter)

Q used to just be a letter. The seventeenth letter in the English alphabet, to be exact. It was innocuous, innocent, forgettable, but at the same time not. Q was ‘every’ in the language of medicine. Q was the charge of electricity, the value of heat transferred. Q was a quasar, and the set of all rational numbers in the universe. It was even a cipher in the coding she valued more than water. But then Q took on another meaning, another form, another person. Q—the _Quartermaster_ —was merely a shell for one to inhabit, then grow out of in death. For no one left the Quartermaster position alive, by fate or by chance. 

This Q was not always Q. It was a common misconception for the Quartermaster to simply spring up when the need arose, reproducing asexually through some sort of telepathic wavelength. One Quartermaster would disappear, another would come not days later, either by appointment, or outside interference. This Q was a victim of both the former and the latter. 

 If you asked her, Q would say she had no name, that the only thing she could be called—and wished to answer to—was that seventeenth letter of the English alphabet, and nothing else. But that is not true; Q had many names, many faces, many forms. She was not always the ice queen of Q branch, no matter how much she tried to make it so. She was once a daughter, once a sister, once a student, once a dancer. No matter how badly her brothers tried to foster the need for science, math, logic, Q rebelled. She pursued the passion of ballet.

Thus began her fall. 

Q shed her birth name like a snake, took on the form of Cygne: the Swan. A ballerina had elegance in all parts of life, and the dark web was not an exception. If you asked her why she pursued what was undoubtedly cyber terrorism, Q would have simply said “Boredom.”

It was one thing her brothers managed to instill in her: the need to alleviate boredom through any means necessary. 

While Q’s brothers failed to get her into politics, failed to stoke her passion for maths and science, Q remained focused on the marvelous realm of cyberspace. Her eldest brother favored micromanaging countries into turmoil, changing tides of war with a well placed hand and a jovial smile. Her approach was far less subtle: changing the monetary notes of a country in the midst of civil war, leaking shipping manifests, troop locations, anything that paid. Ballet was not inexpensive, and neither was Uni. She needed the money. The third child was often overlooked, and the financial burden of her education, compounded by her brothers’, was not one she wished to carry. 

So she stole, lied, cheated, exploded a building or two. All in the name of education and dance.

Then, Six found her. 

It was like the plot to a bad movie, the way she was kidnapped. Alone, on her way back from a twelve-hour rehearsal schedule. Determined to enroll in the most prestigious dance academy in London. Thrust into the back of a van in the dead of night, blindfolded and drugged and bound by men dressed in black. Awoken in a sterile interrogation room, tongue like cotton in her mouth, she had been forcibly seated across from a demure woman who reminded Q of her grandmother in manner, word, and thought. She was terrified. She was angry. 

“You know why you’re here,” the woman had said. She even knew Q’s name. Her real name. That jarred her. Of course, she didn’t know it was Six’s Director at the time, the infamous Evil Queen of Numbers. For all Q knew, the woman she sat before was one extremely pissed off victim of Q’s cyber machinations. 

Q—Cygne, she was not yet Q—was unashamed to say she cried when a gentleman with a gun was ordered by said woman to shoot her. 

Eventually, when Q settled, after the gentleman was ordered to break her leg to quiet her—completely unfathomable and equally (if not more) terrifying than being shot in the head—the woman got to the point. It was a job offer, the woman wanted to extend. Cygne would be placed in the experimental technology division, monitored via ankle bracelet and—once the technology was available—her own blood. She would live under the ever watchful gaze of MI6. Her status as employee would be probationary. If, at the end of her probationary hiring, she was still deemed a danger to Queen and Country, the gentleman behind her would be more than obliged to shoot her. 

Cygne unashamedly said yes, ignoring the forms she signed with trembling hands. The nondisclosure agreements. Her bank account information. She signed over control of everything to MI6 for the chance of freedom. For she was, in essence, a scared girl who had gone too far down the rabbit hole of blackhat illegality. It was time for her to learn her lesson, or face the consequence with her very life. 

Her first day at Six, in Q branch, name eliminated and rearranged to protect her anonymity, the prior Q— _her_ Q—promoted her to R. 

When questioned, Major Boothroyd told her, in no uncertain terms, that his word was law this far down in Vauxhall Cross. And S. Quanna—now R—was not one to question the grandfatherly old soul. 

Six months later, Q branch exploded the first time.

Six months later, R became Q. 

But even still, the dark web did not forget Cygne. 

.

“I’m being stalked,” said Q to 004—her favorite double-O at the moment—as she struggled to pull on her shirt. Propriety was the only thing keeping him turned around. That, and the fear that Q would send him out into the field with nothing more than a water pistol and a fragment of paper on his next score of missions. “I’m sure of it.”

Alec Trevelyan couldn’t help but smile lightly at the very thought. Luckily, his back was firmly to the struggling Quartermaster, so she did not witness his doubt at a fact she took to be so sacrosanct. He had been in Argentina, inserting himself with the local narcos in Puerto Iguazú. Six weeks into a prospective three month mission, he was yanked from the innermost circle of Argentina’s most prolific trafficker of cocaine by the destruction of Six’s headquarters and the relocation to Number 10. Once on English soil, he was made aware of the situation—that Q branch had been directly targeted. That the Quartermaster was in critical care.

He was the one to fetch R’s coffee while they waited. While she prayed to her God.

“Bugger this—” spat Q disgustedly. “004, a hand?”

Alec turned around as bade, politely ignoring the sunset of bruises on the Quartermaster’s pale lower back, stretching below her trouser line. He barely acknowledged the sterile bandages that protected the burn that ran from flank to shoulder from view. Alec patiently threaded Q’s broken arm—cast and all—through the arm of a soft feeling black shirt that only buttoned midway down the breast. It was loose, light, and Alec knew Moneypenny had a hand in procuring it. The Quartermaster purposefully avoided Alec’s gaze as he popped the shirt over her head, and left her to her own devices. The embarrassment was clear enough in her gaze, in the way her face flushed under the sickly green and purple bruising on her face. He did not wish to add to it; the Quartermaster was always an enigma, considered untouchable, stone instead of man. This Quartermaster had been taken down to the realm of flesh and blood, and that was a perversion to her. 

“By your leave, Quartermaster,” said Alec, after an awkward pause. He knew the Quartermaster almost as well as 007—also known as the tosser currently manhandling his way through Argentina on _his_ mission. He knew that the woman favored control, favored order. Her word was law in her realm, and now it had been uprooted by an attack on home soil. 

The raw vulnerability was eating her alive, and Alec was intimately briefed with what to expect from a genius-level computer engineer who recently suffered from a traumatic brain injury. 

Paranoia, however, was high on the list of symptoms. 

“If you are being stalked,” said Alec levelly as they entered the elevator, rode it down to the ground floor, “it’s a very good thing you’re going to have your own attaché of agents with you.”

Q scoffed and shouldered her bag a little better on her one good arm. 

“I don’t need sitters,” said Q derisively. 

“According to M, you do.”

“And let me guess: M’s orders come from “On high?”?”

Alec was diplomatic as he opened the passenger side door of his conservative Audi for Q to uncomfortably slither into. 

“I’m not at liberty to say,” he said, closing the door to ward off any commentary, at least until he slid into the driver’s seat. Q, in that spare amount of time, had fired off a scathing text message to the blocked number that held the spot as the most frequent bane of her existence. Alec, however, had noticed the paleness of her skin, how it was beginning to take on the consistency of soured milk, how she bit her lip and shifted as if in great pain. Which she probably was; the IV had been removed hours earlier, and with it went all the drugs keeping the pain at bay. 

The nurse had handed Alec a small paper bag stamped with the Royal Marsden logo, full of antibiotics, steroids, narcotic pain medication. Alec dug into that bag now, removed an amber vial with _co-codamol 30/500_ stamped on the label, and handed a tablet to Q to swallow. Begrudgingly she took it, dry swallowed the tablet past a throat still sore from extubation. 

“Can you tell me our current situation?” asked Q, beginning to lean on the passenger side door for support. 

“I can tell you that R has Q branch up and running as efficiently as Vauxhall Cross,” said Alec. 

Q looked at him, muzzy, pain medication beginning to seep into her joints. The answer displeased her, he could tell, and he watched her grip on her cell phone tighten that much more. 

“Tell me:” he says instead, intent on diverting Q from her current train of thought, at least until inevitable unconsciousness had claimed her. “Why do you think you’re being stalked?”

Q, at last, perked up at that, though Alec could tell she was more than well on her way to drug induced slumber. Again, her hand reflexively tightened on her mobile, and her voice was whisper thin as she replied:

“A hunch,” said Q, eyes drifting closed, “and maybe a memory. Maybe more. Can’t remember much before the explosion. But I can remember feeling…” She hummed here, unable to grasp the word. 

“Insecure?” offered Alec as he made the turn toward the waterfront. 

“That,” drawled Q. “And violated. Like…my safety had been ripped from me. Jarring.”

Alec stiffened, looked at Q, who was well and truly half asleep, head lolling on her shoulder, bruised face facing him. His eyes briefly darted to her cell phone, still clutched in hand, then back at Q’s face. 

“Q?” Now seized with a fit of urgency, he almost wished he hadn’t dosed her as early as he did; but if he hadn’t, would Q had begun to confess her fears to him? It was a double-edged sword he was willing to suffer. “Q, I need you to answer a question for me.”

He received nothing in reply but a thoughtful hum.

“Has someone been in contact with you?”

Q didn’t reply, not for a long while. With a sigh, Alec resigned himself to the fact that his chance had slipped away, that questioning Q would have to wait until the daylight hours. He knew her, knew she would deny any prior knowledge of the conversation, deny fearing for her safety before conveniently being blown up. 

Sighing through his nose, letting out a quiet “Bugger,”, he parked the car outside of Q’s lovely apartment building, walked around to the passenger side, and carried Q up to her flat. This was done much to the dismay of the elderly concierge who moved around his desk with a pitiful sounding, “Oh, Miss _Charbonneau—_ ” It took every bit of charm in Alec’s disposal to assure the man that Q was fine, that Q simply was in a car accident, and needed time to recover in her own bed. 

Eventually, with Q’s forehead pressed to the underside of his jaw, and one arm tossed limply over his shoulder, Alec finagled his way into the elevator, up to the twenty-second floor, and into Q’s spacious apartment. He was vaguely aware of the rumors surrounding Q’s employment, knew of the failsafes in place in case she went rogue. Alec had not been privy to her first hiring, to the girl who had been known simply as “S. Quanna” for the weeks before old Major Boothroyd had elected to make the girl his R. Sure, he had known Q as R, grown comfortable with her offhanded acerbic commentary and the intricacies of penguin mating while he was trying _very hard_ to fuck a gorgeous mark. How delightedly unsexy it would be to say, _“004 signing off”_ mid-fuck. Q certainly knew it. 

He looked at the hand not thrown over his shoulder. Her cell phone is still clutched, like a life line, cradled between her body and his. When he eased Q onto her bed, ignored the irritated hissing of a long hared tabby (who swiped at his ankles as she left the room), Alec gently removed the cell phone from Q’s lax grip. 

Alec turned, was almost to the door, when a whisper caught his ear, just loud enough to give him pause. Q’s voice was like a mirage: there one second, gone the other. And what she said gave him pause.

“A ghost.” Was her answer to a question gone forgotten. Quiet, Alec looked at the cell phone in his hand, the one whose display had lit up with the receipt of a text. 

What it said had him phoning R. 

“ _Yes, 004?_ ” the girl answered quietly as Alec settled at Q’s kitchen table, looked out the window to the harbor before him. His Glock was on the table (he needed no fancy palm coding like a _certain_ agent); automatically, he had begun cleaning it, preparing for the inevitable. 

“I’m sending the Quartermaster’s personal phone to you,” said Alec. “There’s some information on it that I believe M would find helpful.” Rhythmically, he ejected the magazine, locked the slide open.

Immediately, R’s interest piqued. 

 _“You recovered her phone from the bomb site?”_ Close the slide, release the pin.

“No.” Pull the slide back a hairsbreadth and lock it. “This is the one Miss Moneypenny just delivered to her.”

He could practically hear R’s brain turning over, processing the information. In the meanwhile, he removed the spring with a practiced flick of his thumb. 

“ _What information?_ ” came R’s response, long after he had removed the barrel of the Glock and had begun cleaning it. 

Alec mulled over the information for a long while. Long enough for the phone to receive another illicit text message from a different burner number from before. All lowercase, the messages read in order as such: 

_Received 13:22_

_you’ve gone soft, cygne. attempting an ip trace is so primary school of you._

_Received 13:59_

_i’m ashamed, cygne. you used to be better at hiding…_

But it was the last text, the one most recently received, that had Alec cleaning his Glock, contacting R, handing the phone over. It was the message he read to R aloud:

_Received 14:11_

_i see you ;)_

.

Q woke later that night, feeling like she had drank an entire bottle of tequila, and regretting ever living. Her tongue tasted rancid, and she was pretty certain her leg was trying to perform self-separation. But she was conscious, and under one hand she could feel Renoir softly purring, as if he could heal her through frequency alone. Oh, how she wished it was true. 

A quick glance at her bedside table declared the time to be barely half past nine. She had slept the whole day away in a drug-induced haze. It almost made Q long for the hospital; at least there she didn’t have to cook her own food. Though the scent of something vaguely beefy stewing certainly set her mind aflutter. Who in their right mind would break into her flat? And to _cook._ Never mind that, who could even bypass her security (most of which was hideously illegal) to break in and cook? Was it some sort of psychopathic foreplay? 

Q reached for her phone, half a mind to phone downstairs for assistance from one of the lower level Six field agent on retainer in her building, only to find it mysteriously missing. 

“Curious,” she mused aloud, mouth disgustingly dry. 

“That answers my question,” came Alec’s voice from the vague vicinity of her living room. While she had searched for her phone, Alec had opened the door to her bedroom and regarded her fruitless quest with smiling eyes. Like most double-Os, he seemed to be allergic to emotions not relegated to murder. Unlike most double-Os, you could read his cues well enough to guesstimate his general feelings about a subject. 

Instead of thanking Alec for cooking, Q chose instead to groan and bury herself back in bed. 

“I thought I told you to tell Mallory that I don’t need sitters,” she bemoaned. 

“You know,” said Alec bemusedly. “I was inclined to agree with him, before your stalker started texting you.”

That garnered the reaction Alec wanted. Stiffly, Q rose from bed, chin inclined aristocratically and eyes hard and owlish without her glasses. She didn’t even dignify him with a squint, to try and clarify his image. She stared, robotic, like the Quartermaster she was. 

“You know him.” It was phrased as uncompromising truth. 

Q levered herself out of bed, tottered unsteadily, but did not fall. She did not dignify him with a response until she was seated on her couch, a bowl of stew in hand. 

“I don’t know,” was her answer. 

“You said something, before you fell asleep—” began Alec, from his place on the coffee table before her. He had gone to lengths to make sure she was comfortable, draped the afghan that had lain across the back of her couch over her shoulders. 

Q leveled him with a poisonous look. 

“I talk in my sleep,” was her defense. 

Alec shook his head. “This was different.”

Begrudgingly, Q continued to eat.

“What did you do before MI6, Q?” Alec asked, once the silence had turned poisonous. 

Q didn’t grace him with an answer. Instead she handed her half-empty bowl to him for discarding. 

“I don’t think that’s much of your business, 004,” came her response, perfectly eloquent and diplomatic. It was jarring, to hear such a commanding voice come from the face of one who looked three steps from death. “Now, I think I need my co-comadol, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s a rerun of _Death Comes to Pemberley_ on that will simply be a sin to miss.”

And that was how Alec found himself seated beside Six’s half-recovered Quartermaster, scavenged beer (Moneypenny’s, most definitely) in hand, watching the continued antics of the Bennet sisters. For a while, all was quiet.

Then, Q decided to speak.

“I danced, Alec,” she said, head pillowed on the arm of the couch, feet pressed against his thigh. “Ballet. Classical. I was very, very good. Covent Garden material.” Her voice had taken on a wistful tone. “I was Hermione one year—the understudy had broken her ankle opening night, and I was the only understudy in house at the time. It was…”

“Awe-inspiring?” offered Alec, who knew better than to interrupt.

“Magical,” she breathed out. “I wanted nothing more in the world than to hold those hours in my hands, keep repeating them over and over until I was prima ballerina. Maybe one day prima ballerina assoluta.”

Q went quiet again for a long while. Long enough for Alec to believe she had drifted off to sleep again. 

“What happened?” he asked, not expecting a reply. 

Beside him, Q stiffened, as if the memory repulsed her. On impulse, he placed a hand on her calf, grounding her in reality, in the present. 

“The average family whose son or daughter enters ballet competitively will be expected to pay £71,573.51, depending on the prestige of the school, and the age the child is when entered. That number absolutely terrified my parents, who had already raised two sons. But they would not stop me, and, after a while, I got guilty.

“Hacking is deceptively easy, when you’re desperate,” said Q quietly. “It’s abhorrent how much people are willing to pay you to leak documents, fix sports games…”

Here she went quiet. 

“I got sixty million pounds for attacking and obliterating the British embassy’s security. Twelve hours later, M—my M—had me kidnapped. And here I am.”

Alec was quiet. He had nothing to reply, nothing to offer to the conversation. Q simply needed to talk, needed to explain herself to someone who wasn’t Moneypenny, wasn’t Mallory. 

Wasn’t Bond. 

“The darknet doesn’t forget you, once you’ve sunk deep enough to see clear to the other side, Alec,” she mused, watching Fitzwilliam visit Wickham in prison. “And it certainly won’t let you go, no matter how hard you try.”

Alec drank abortedly from his beer, watched the conversation unfold from an obviously innocent Wickham. One of Q’s cats—the one who actually tolerated his presence—had leapt onto his lap, kneaded his trousers with it’s paws, and proceeded to curl up. The other one, the one that hated him, had taken up watch by Q’s head, eyes narrowed and never leaving his. 

It was downright eery. 

“Who’s been texting you, Q?” asked Alec, more to his beer than anything. 

Beside him, Q shifted. He almost didn’t expect a response from her. 

Eyes bleary with pain medication and exhaustion, her answer was as quiet—if not quieter—than the one before.

“Death.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr


End file.
